Exiting Austerity and Liberalization: Does prospect theory help to understand choices of the governments and the people?

HIGH-RISK POLITICS: Explaining and improving political actors' decision-making on electorally risky issues [2012-2017]
This program's overall aim is to advance and test a theory of political decision-making under risk that holds on the individual level (politicians), the meso level (parties), and the macro level (governments). My team and I draw on and develop prospect theory, which predicts that people take risk-averse decisions when facing gains while they are risk-seeking or acceptant when confronting losses.
Objective 1, which was executed by Jona Linde, is to experimentally test to what extent (groups of) politicians display the same attitude towards risk as "normal" individuals do, i.e., whether prospect theory's predictions hold. Objective 2, on which Mariken van der Velden works, is to establish empirically why some political parties risk turning their constituency away by changing their policy position on salient topics, but others do not. Objective 3, executed by Dieuwertje Kuijpers, is to assess empirically why some governments take decisions involving substantial electoral risks with regard to military intervention, while others do not.
We answer the research questions through a series of quantitative, qualitative and experimental techniques in this program that runs from November 2012 to November 2017. The program is financed with a VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grant nr. 452-11-005).